Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  Conan Doyle let it be known that he would produce another dozen stories if The Strand agreed to pay £1,000 for the group. This was an unprecedented amount of money, and it appears that he would have been perfectly content if the figure had discouraged Smith from pressing the matter. Once again, however, The Strand agreed to the terms without protest, and Conan Doyle set to work on the stories that became The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

  Though the new series presented a challenge to his ingenuity, Conan Doyle still took enjoyment from his creation. “His reason for refraining from writing any more stories for a while is a candid one,” The Strand’s interviewer would report. “He is fearful of spoiling a character of which he is particularly fond, but he declares that already he has enough material to carry him through another series, and merrily assures me that he thought the opening story of the next series of ‘Sherlock Holmes,’ to be published in this magazine, was of such an unsolvable character, that he had positively bet his wife a shilling that she would not guess the true solution of it until she got to the end of the chapter!”

  It’s likely that Conan Doyle kept his shilling, as the first of the new stories was “Silver Blaze,” published in December 1892. The story marked another high point in the career of Sherlock Holmes. Though the plot, involving a missing racehorse, was especially good, Sherlockians cherish the story for a deathless patch of dialogue. This occurs as a local police inspector, sensing that the detective knows more than he is telling about the case, tries to draw him out:

  “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

  “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

  “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

  “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

  Even before Greenhough Smith requested the new series, Conan Doyle must have realized that Holmes could not be abandoned so easily. Mail had been pouring in at an astonishing rate, much of it addressed to Holmes himself. “I get many letters from all over the country about Sherlock Holmes,” Conan Doyle told The Bookman. “Sometimes from schoolboys, sometimes from commercial travellers who are great readers, sometimes from lawyers pointing out mistakes in my law. One letter actually contained a request for portraits of Sherlock at different periods of his life.”

  Requests for autographs were also a regular feature of the post bag—though Sherlock Holmes tended to get more requests than Conan Doyle. Occasionally, when a certain “pawky strain of humor” came over him, Conan Doyle would send a brief postcard in reply, expressing regret that the detective was not available.

  The signature, however, was calculated to raise eyebrows. It was: “Dr. John Watson.”

  10

  The Two Collaborators

  “And you have been most intimately associated with someone whose initials were J.A., and whom you afterwards were eager to entirely forget.”

  —SHERLOCK HOLMES IN “THE GLORIA SCOTT”

  In August of 1893, a letter arrived from Robert Louis Stevenson, one of Conan Doyle’s literary heroes. Stevenson, who was then living in Samoa, wrote to compliment him on his vivid descriptions of Louis XIV’s court in The Refugees. “Have you any document for the decapitation?” Stevenson went on to inquire. For Conan Doyle, praise and encouragement from Stevenson would have been very welcome—especially the words: “Do it again.”

  The two men corresponded for much of that year, and discovered that they shared an interest in spiritualism—Stevenson opened one letter with the salutation, “O! Frolic fellow Spookist!” Conan Doyle even toyed with the idea of visiting his new correspondent in Samoa, prompting Stevenson to inquire if he and his wife were “Great Eaters,” as rations were often spare. No doubt Conan Doyle would have received an enthusiastic welcome in spite of his large appetite, as Stevenson made a point of reading the Sherlock Holmes tales aloud to his household. Stevenson, who had also attended the University of Edinburgh, took a particular interest in the inspiration for Conan Doyle’s detective. “Only one thing troubles me,” he wrote, “can this be my old friend ‘Joe’ Bell?”

  In these early years of his success, Conan Doyle liked to imagine himself at the center of a community of writers. “At that time I was practicing in a small way as a doctor,” he was to say of his Southsea and London years, “and in a draper’s shop close by H. G. Wells was an assistant. There was also a raw-boned Irishman rolling about London. His name was Bernard Shaw. There was another named Thomas Hardy, and there was a young journalist struggling for a living in Nottingham, whose name was Barrie.”

  Sherlock Holmes had made Conan Doyle’s name, but The White Company, he believed, served to establish his credentials. Encouraged by its success, he made an effort to meet and befriend other men of letters. Not all of these meetings went well. Ralph David Blumenfeld, a journalist with the Daily Express, found the young writer to be a singularly grim figure.

  “The Author’s Club, just established in St. James’ Place, used to have Monday evening sessions at which budding authors were wont to read from their manuscripts,” Blumenfeld recalled.

  On one of these evenings I sat between Mr. F. Frankfort Moore, then a leading story writer, and Sir Walter Besant, the father of the Author’s Club.

  Dr. Conan Doyle rose to read from a new story which he had just completed. It was all about obstetrics and the terror of a household in which a woman was about to become a mother; all about the husband’s agonies, the doctor’s embarrassments and professional distress—I forget the details, but my mind jumps across to that evening in St. James’, with a hundred men in evening dress sitting uneasily under the monotonous flow of the Scottish-Northumbrian phrases, with not a sign of light, just a long, gloomy, ghastly dissertation which, if I remember rightly, made me feel unhappy and cold.

  Finally, the big man with the rough voice stopped talking and sat down abruptly. Walter Besant turned to me and said, “Have you ever heard worse?” I had not.

  The story, probably “The Curse of Eve,” later published in Round the Red Lamp, may not have won any admirers at the Author’s Club, but Conan Doyle would fare better elsewhere. A new magazine called The Idler—whose founders included Jerome K. Jerome of Three Men in a Boat fame—introduced the rising young author to a “jolly crew” of literary types. As The Strand could not absorb all of Conan Doyle’s flood of manuscripts, he was glad to have an additional outlet for his work. The Idler purported to take a more humorous tone than The Strand, but one would not have guessed it from Conan Doyle’s contributions. While Jerome offered bits of whimsy concerning fashion and sport, Conan Doyle weighed in with a series of grisly medical stories of the type that had so impressed the gentlemen of the Author’s Club. Even so, The Idler staff welcomed Conan Doyle as one of their own. The stable of writers ranged from the Anglo-Jewish activist Israel Zangwill to the prolific Eden Phillpotts and the Canadian-born Gilbert Parker. All of them warmed to the affable, unpretentious Conan Doyle. Anthony Hope, author of The Prisoner of Zenda, remarked that the famous newcomer looked as if he’d never heard of a book, and from the point of view of The Idler crew, this was an asset. Conan Doyle enjoyed the surprisingly boisterous merriment of the magazine’s afternoon teas, which often led to drinking of a more serious nature, and ended on one occasion with three of the magazine’s leading lights asleep under the table.

  Conan Doyle got along especially well with Jerome himself, who later dedicated a collection of essays to “Big-Hearted, Big-Souled, Big-Bodied Friend Conan Doyle.” In the summer of 1892, Jerome joined the family on a brief excursion to Norway. The trip had been organized as a restful holiday for Louisa, who was pregnant again, but since the itinerary included long days on horse trails and a visit to a leper colony, it cannot have been entirely restorative. Jerome found the Conan Doyles to be a “vigorous family,” and evinced a particular admiration for Conan Doyle’s sister Connie, who spent much of the choppy crossing to Norway ministering to seasick companions. “A handsome girl,” Jerome
declared, “she might have posed as Brunhilda.”

  While Connie tended to the sick, Conan Doyle busied himself learning Norwegian. One day, he fell into a conversation with a young Norwegian military officer, offering what he took to be a series of comments on the weather. In fact, he had unwittingly surrendered his horse to his new acquaintance, a fact that did not become apparent until both the horse and the young officer were long gone. “For the rest of that trip,” Jerome recalled, “Doyle talked less Norwegian.”

  In December 1892, Conan Doyle and Jerome took a tour of Scotland Yard’s famed “Black Museum.” Joining them was a young journalist named E. W. Hornung, who despite his poor eyesight and fragile health was an enthusiastic participant in Idler cricket matches. Willie, as he was known, became a frequent visitor in South Norwood, though his interest had less to do with Conan Doyle than with his sister Connie, whom Hornung was actively courting. “I like young Willie Hornung very much,” Conan Doyle reported to the Ma’am. “He is one of the sweetest natured and most delicate-minded men I ever knew.”

  Hornung and Connie would marry the following year, and for a time Conan Doyle continued to give his sister an allowance to help the couple get started. The help would not be needed for very long, since Hornung went on to become a successful author in his own right. His most famous creations, the gentleman burglar A. J. Raffles and his sidekick “Bunny” Manders, were a kind of inverse Holmes and Watson. Hornung dedicated his best-selling Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, which introduced the debonair thief, to Conan Doyle—“To A.C.D.,” he wrote. “This form of flattery.” It is thought that The Doings of Raffles Haw may have suggested the name of Hornung’s famous character.

  Conan Doyle expressed a somewhat priggish ambivalence over the “rather dangerous” device of casting a villain as the hero of an adventure tale, but this did not prevent him from writing a glowing foreword to a collection of Hornung’s work in later years. Hornung, he claimed, had a finer wit than Samuel Johnson: “No one could say a neater thing, and his writings, good as they are, never adequately represented the powers of the man, nor the quickness of his brain.” As proof of this, Conan Doyle was fond of repeating a Hornung quip about Sherlock Holmes: “Though he might be more humble, there is no police like Holmes.”

  Conan Doyle had an even greater regard for the wit of James Barrie, another new friend from The Idler crew. Though Peter Pan was still some years off, Barrie had already made his name with A Window in Thrums, The Little Minister, and the play Richard Savage. Conan Doyle took an immediate liking to the five-foot-one writer—“about whom,” he wrote, “there is nothing small except his body.”

  The two men had much in common; both were Scots, and Barrie, like Stevenson, had also attended the University of Edinburgh. Conan Doyle’s passion for cricket, the sport that gave him “more pleasure than any other,” sealed their friendship. Barrie had organized a team called the “Allahakbarries”—a play on his own name and an Arabic phrase meaning “Lord help us”—largely composed of authors and theater people. Conan Doyle, the natural athlete, made a welcome addition. “A grand bowler,” one teammate wrote. “Knows a batsman’s weakness by the colour of the mud on his shoes.”

  “We played in the old style,” Conan Doyle would recall, “caring little about the game and a good deal about a jolly time and pleasant scenery.” Actually, this was true of Barrie, but Conan Doyle plowed into these friendly contests with his usual intensity, to the alarm of his more easygoing companions. After one typically energetic performance, a fellow author expressed relief over the “surprisingly low death rate.”

  Among friends Conan Doyle always downplayed his ability, but in his autobiography, written some thirty years later, he took pains to quote a newspaper account of one such “jolly time,” which noted that the Allahakbarries’ seventy-two runs were scored “chiefly, if not wholly” by Conan Doyle. Though he takes care to garland the account in modesty, claiming it “entirely exaggerates” his powers, he obviously took pleasure in his sporting reputation. He kept a mud-encrusted cricket bat in his study, a souvenir of a day in which he scored a century at the famed Lord’s Cricket Ground, and he traveled abroad with British teams whenever possible. Once, while playing in Holland, Conan Doyle’s stellar play averted a looming defeat, and his teammates swarmed around to bear him from the field in triumph. No sooner had the players hoisted the beefy champion onto their shoulders than their knees gave out. Somewhat embarrassed, Conan Doyle walked off under his own power. Despite his bulk, more than one spectator mistook Conan Doyle for a professional. After a particularly hard-fought test at Lord’s, he was asked if he, like his companions, also claimed to be an author. Conan Doyle allowed as how he did a bit of writing now and then, when his cricket engagements allowed him some leisure.

  Toward the end of 1892 Conan Doyle’s cricket schedule eased sufficiently to allow a lecture tour of Scotland. There he paid a visit to Barrie at his boyhood home in Kirriemuir, which had provided the background for much of Barrie’s early fiction. The locals, Conan Doyle discovered, could not quite come to grips with the achievements of their native son, even though tourists had begun to appear in the village, eager to see the setting of Barrie’s books. “Some people here,” Conan Doyle wrote, “think that Barrie’s fame is due to the excellence of his handwriting. Others think that he prints the books himself and hawks them round London. When he goes for a walk they stalk him, and watch him from behind trees to find out how he does it.”

  Conan Doyle himself harbored no such misapprehensions, and even after Barrie had gone on to greater fame as a playwright, Conan Doyle maintained a preference for the early fiction. “Great as are Barrie’s plays—and some of them I think are very great—I wish he had never written a line for the theatre. The glamour of it and the—to him—easy success have diverted from literature the man with the purest style of his age.” This was meant kindly, but it can hardly be said that Barrie’s success came easily, as Conan Doyle would learn to his sorrow.

  Some weeks after the Scottish tour, Conan Doyle received a cryptic telegram to the effect that Barrie was ill and needed assistance. Like Watson answering a summons from Holmes—“Come at once if convenient—if inconvenient, come all the same”—Conan Doyle rushed to Barrie’s home in Suffolk to learn the source of his friend’s distress.

  Barrie’s difficulty, it emerged, lay in a commission he had accepted from Richard D’Oyly Carte, the famed theatrical manager. D’Oyly Carte was best known for bringing the work of Gilbert and Sullivan to the English stage. His Savoy Theater and D’Oyly Carte Opera Company existed almost exclusively to showcase Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. Despite their success, relations between W. S. Gilbert, the lyricist, and Arthur Sullivan, the composer, had never been harmonious. Escalating tensions during the producing of The Gondoliers earlier that year had led to a temporary rift between the partners. This left D’Oyly Carte with a gaping hole in his production schedule, and he turned to James Barrie to fill it.

  Initially, D’Oyly Carte had the idea of pairing Barrie, as lyricist, with Sir Arthur Sullivan himself. Sullivan begged off, recommending a former pupil named Ernest Ford as composer. By this time Barrie was hard at work on a comic libretto called Jane Annie, or The Good Conduct Prize, involving the goings-on at a seminary for “the little things that grow into women.” Barrie began the work in high spirits, but soon realized he had bitten off more than he could chew. With D’Oyly Carte pressuring him for a final draft, Barrie called in Conan Doyle, his ringer from the Allahakbarries.

  Ever discreet, Conan Doyle would attribute Barrie’s ill health to a variety of afflictions ranging from a bronchial condition to family bereavement and heart trouble. In fact, Barrie had suffered a nervous collapse under the strain of pinch-hitting for Gilbert. In the circumstances, Conan Doyle felt he could not refuse his ailing friend. He put aside his own work and dedicated himself to helping to finish the libretto.

  As he looked over what Barrie had already written, Conan Doyle felt a sense of
gathering doom. “The only literary gift which Barrie has not got is the sense of poetic rhythm, and the instinct for what is permissible in verse,” he wrote. “Ideas and wit were there in abundance. But the plot itself was not strong, though the dialogue and the situations also were occasionally excellent. I did my best and wrote the lyrics for the second act, and much of the dialogue, but it had to take the predestined shape.”

  This predestined shape, as one reviewer would note, was “hampered by no considerations of probability.” In the first act, Jane Annie, the title character, reveals a strange mesmeric power that causes various mishaps and mistaken identities. In time, this expeditious talent enables her to elope under the watchful eye of her schoolmistress, to the astonishment of the chorus:

  Their conduct’s praised, we are amazed,

  Miss Sims doth sympathize.

  Now let us sing of this wonderful thing,

  With a hyp-hyp-hypnotize!

  “We have rarely seen such a childish device so lavishly employed,” one reviewer would write, “and ‘when in difficulty work it out by hypnotising’ is a maxim that a very poor hack might invent and even a mediocre playwright would despise.” Sad to say, this unhappy inspiration can only have been Conan Doyle’s. His interest in mesmerism had carried over from his Southsea days, and his novella The Parasite, published the following year, would feature a character who shared Jane Annie’s ability to “hyp-hyp-hypnotize.”

  W. S. Gilbert would have found little cause for alarm. Nevertheless, Conan Doyle enjoyed the “comradeship of production” as he and the recuperating Barrie struggled to get the libretto ready for opening night. Conan Doyle, Barrie would recall, “was so good-natured that if we lost him at rehearsals he was sure to be found in a shrouded box writing a new song for some obscure member of the company. They had only to plead with him, ‘I have nothing to say, Mr. Doyle, except half a dozen lines in the first act,’ when he would reply, ‘Oh, my poor chap, too bad,’ and retire into a box, from which he emerged almost instantly with a song.”